Is string theory right? Is it just fantasy? Caught in the landscape, Out of touch with reality Compactified On S5 or T*S3

Space is a pure void Why should it be stringy? Because it’s quantum not classical Nonrenormalizable Any way you quantize You’ll encounter infinity You see

Quanta Must interact Via paths we understand Using Feynman diagrams Often, they will just rebound But now and then they go another way A quantum Loooooop Infinities will make you cry Unless you can renormalize your model Of baryons, fermions And all other states of matter

Curved space: The graviton Can be thought of as a field But these infinities are real In a many-body Loop diagram Our results diverge no matter what we do… A Quantum Soup (any way you quantize) Kiss your fields goodbye Guess Einstein’s theory wasn’t complete at all!

I see extended 1-D objects with no mass What’s their use? What’s their use? Can they give us quark plasma? What to minimize? What functional describes this String? Nambu-Goto! (Nambu-Goto) Nambu-Goto! (Nambu-Goto) How to quantize I don’t know Polyakov! I’m just a worldsheet, please minimize me He’s just a worldsheet from a string theory Reperametrized by a Weyl symmetry!

Fermi, Bose, open, closed, orientable? Vibrations Modes! They become particles (particles!) Vibrations They become particles (particles!) Vibrations They become particles (particles!) Become particles (particles!) Become particles (many many many many particle…) Modes modes modes modes modes modes modes! Oh mamma mia mamma mia, Such a sea of particles! A tachyon, with a dilaton and gravity-vity-VITY

(rock out!)

Now we need ten dimensions and I’ll tell you why (anomaly cancellation!) So to get down to 4D we compactify! Oh, Kahler! (Kahler manifold) Manifolds must be Kahler! (Complex Reimannian symplectic form) If we wanna preserve Any of our super-symmetry

(Superstrings of type I, IIa and IIb) (Heterotic O and Heterotic E) (All are one through S and T duality) (Thank you Ed Witten for that superstring revolution and your new M-theory!)